Films set in one location aren’t as rare as you might think. But it’s still unusual for a Hollywood movie to scale down its drama into a single physical place. Here are some of the best examples of the one location film.

Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room.

There is a certain allure to films set in one location (or almost entirely in one location). Certainly, the challenge of the writer and director is to make the on-screen drama cinematic in a way that transcends the immobility of location which is somewhat fascinating in itself. But it’s also a great way to take the audience on a journey of discovery that more closely reflects the characters own dramatic arcs which adds another compelling layer to the narrative.

Scaling down not only the world we see to a single physical place but also story time which in some examples closely resembles actual time, gives these “one location” films a tangible immediacy that heightens their emotional dexterity, enhancing our immersion inside the story.

Component Parts: The Allure Of Films Set In One Location

Kevin Smith’s Clerks takes place almost entirely in a convenience store.

Films set in one location (or predominantly in a single location) have always fascinated me. Perhaps it’s their theatre roots, as many single location films derive from the work of playwrights. The consequence of that is strong characterisation, an emphasis on good acting, and tight control of plot that usually takes place over a few hours.

The best films set in one location display the talents of their scribes, a keen eye for authentic dialogue that works to bolster depth of character and provide momentum to the story. They also show the best of their directors. You need an ability to maintain pace and drama with limited manoeuvrability (there’s no easy cut to a car chase to get the audience’s attention), the talent to get the most out of your actors, and the creative flair to use constricted space.

What qualifies for “single location”?

Reservoir Dogs takes place predominantly inside a warehouse.

The list of films set in one location all take place predominantly in one place – be that a small boat, a mansion, a warehouse, an apartment, a convenience store. Each film was given leeway to establish the story – in Wait Until Dark, for example, the credit sequence involves plane travel before we arrive at the main location. George A. Romero’sNight of the Living Dead sees the first ten minutes and last few minutes away from the “one location” and Alfred Hitchcock’sDial M For Murder has brief scenes showing the antagonist in another, unrelated building.

Importantly, the films in this list feature large portions of the story in a single physical space – for example, a jury room in 12 Angry Men or a convenience store in Clerks. In The Breakfast Club it’s the library, in Sleuth and Clue it’s a mansion, in Rear Window it’s an apartment.

While compiling the list it also became obvious these films had other generic conventions in common. They largely feature an ensemble cast with two or more lead characters. And they are also generally set over a short period of time – a matter of hours or a day or two.

10. Clerks (Smith, 1994)

Location: Convenience storeSet-up: Dante has to spend the day at work on his day off.Timeframe: One dayQuote: “Melodrama coming from you seems about as natural as an oral bowel movement.”

Shot on a tiny budget acquired by maxing out several credit cards Kevin Smith wrote, produced, directed and starred in this debut film about two convenience store clerks and the many assortment of characters they interact with throughout the day. Although the film has a couple of scenes away from the shop, it is predominantly set in and around the Kwik-Stop convenience store. The film launched Kevin Smith’s career and gave independent distributors Miramax a minor hit in 1994. The film was made for a miniscule $27,500 and grossed over $3 million in a limited release across America.

9. Clue (Lynn, 1985)

Location: New England countryside mansionSet-up: Six people adopt the aliases of the titular family-favourite board game in an attempt to discover who is blackmailing them. However, someone is murdered and the characters have to discover who committed the crime before the police arrive.Timeframe: Approximately 90 minutesQuote: “I have something to say. I’m not going to wait for Wadsworth here to unmask me. I work for the State Department, and I’m a homosexual.”

A big part of the success of ensemble films is in the casting. It’s difficult to look past Jonathan Lynn’sClue as a perfect example of this. Based on the board game of the same name, Clue is a brilliantly conceived and scripted comedy whodunit. Yet, bringing the essentially one-dimensional caricatures from the board game to screen is no easy feat. Lynn, along with collaborator John Landis, achieves it with the energy of Buster Keaton and the smart-dialogue of Neil Simon.

Indeed, the film takes inspiration from Simon’s Murder By Death, however, improves on the great playwright’s work largely in the casting. From Tim Curry’s indefatigable butler and Lesley Ann Warren’s slutty Miss Scarlet, to the reserved yet suspicious Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum and the nervous edginess of Michael McKean’s Mr Green. Every character is beautifully brought to life, and although they remain fundamentally caricatures, each actor has fun with their role.

The film takes place almost in real time, with the New England Gothic Revival mansion the setting for the characters to scurry about in search of the supposed murderer. It’s fast-paced, entertaining fun, and the three alternate endings make for further amusement in discovering just who did it!

8. Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, 1992)

Location: Suburban warehouseSet-up: Bank robbers meet after jewel heist goes wrong – one is bleeding to death; the other three try to figure out who double-crossed them.Timeframe: A few hoursQuote: “All you can do is pray for quick death, which you ain’t gonna get.”

Quentin Tarantino’s debut film has many scenes away from the central location – the warehouse where the bank robbers meet after the botched jewel heist – but, since these are presented in flashback, the present day story line takes place almost exclusively in the one location.

In many ways Reservoir Dogs is a classic single location movie – ensemble cast, one major setting, events take place over a period of a few hours. Significantly, what differs it from those films deriving from the theatre are the flashbacks. Tarantino uses the flashback to tell us story information and develop each character in more depth. It’s a more convenient way of telling a single location story than the way in which 12 Angry Men or Lifeboat are told. But it allows the filmmaker to give the audience more action. This can be both good and bad. Cutting to an important flashback means there’s always something happening, but it does stifle the forward momentum of the story. It is also easier on the screenwriter to be able to develop characters by showing their past rather than developing them in the present. The beauty of 12 Angry Men is that each character is an individual, each has his traits and quirks and political sway, and yet we learn all this through their interaction in the present. This is a much more difficult proposition for the writer.

But Tarantino, by his own admission, is a product of the cinema. He’s a film fanatic and therefore his script is informed by the movies he’s experienced. The flashback is very much a characteristic of film. He uses his flashbacks in Reservoir Dogs perfectly, and the film never becomes bogged down by them. This is thanks largely to his verbose but quick-witted dialogue, that’s infused by an acknowledgement of and nostalgic reaction to pop-culture. The film also benefits from Tarantino failing to let the audience in on the heist itself. We never see what actually happens, only a brief scene prior to the attempted robbery and the aftermath. We then get to understand what happened by the characters discussing the events and arguing about the possibility of an insider working with the police. The film also benefits from the ensemble cast who work overtime for the then fledgling director, and the seventies rock n roll soundtrack that adds a shade of light to the ultra-violence depicted on-screen.

7. Lifeboat (Hitchcock, 1944)

Location: Allied lifeboat floating in the AtlanticSet-up: Allied survivors band together on a small lifeboat after their ship is sunk by a German U-boat.Timeframe: A few daysQuote: “Dying together is even more personal than living together.”

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s early American films, Lifeboat was a difficult movie to make for the director, and was met by a mixed critical reaction. However, it has become recognised as one of Hitchcock’s best films. From the same stable as Rear Window, Dial M For Murder, and Rope, the master filmmaker grips his audience to their seats with tension and suspense confined to the simple, one location set-up of the lifeboat.

6. The Breakfast Club (Hughes, 1985)

Location: SchoolSet-up: Five students spend the day in Saturday detention.Timeframe: One dayQuote: Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did was wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us – in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.”

The quintessential 1980s teen-drama from director John Hughes is a daring exercise in simplicity during a particularly fast-paced, high concept inspired era of American cinema. Essentially, Hughes made a crowd-pleasing movie for a young audience wanting eye-candy and cheap thrills. It worked because its characters – based entirely on high-school stereotypes – worked so perfectly in mirroring the same fears and anxieties, peer-pressure, growing pains, love, ambition, and parental politics faced by a generation of youth. With its pop-culture references and mod-rock soundtrack it was a product of its time. But Hughes’ perfectly composed script, a tale of friendship breaking through the deep-rooted divisions of high-school social groups is one that continues to resonate decades later. It highlights that although things have changed, Hughes’ characterisation and depiction of teenagers is spot-on: a culture that may change and alternate aesthetically over time, but one that remains challenged by the stereotypes permeating from class, sex, ability, fashion, and further to issues of religion, race, and so on.

5. Dial M For Murder (Hitchcock, 1954)

Location: London apartmentSet-up: An ex-tennis player who married for money and gave up the sport plots to murder his wife.Timeframe: Several daysQuote: “People don’t commit murder on credit.”

Frederick Knott wrote the original play that forms the basis for Dial M For Murder. It was written in the early 1950s, debuted as a BBC television play, and then had stints on London’s West End and New York’s Broadway. Several years later Knott would write his only other successful play – Wait Until Dark – which appears here in third place on the list, directed by Terrence Young and starring Audrey Hepburn. Both films are supreme examples of well-crafted, brilliantly characterised suspense stories. They feature Knott’s favoured trait of an innocent woman trapped in a seemingly lawless situation. They are also based almost exclusively in the apartment of the victim.

It’s the simplicity of Dial M For Murder, delivered with such style and controlled elegance by Hitchcock, that makes the unspectacular nature of the setting and the action thoroughly spectacular. The ticking time-bomb moment when Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) realises his watch has stopped and he’s late making the call to his contract killer, most probably botching the entire plan, is simple in its construction but perfectly executed. It’s a sequence of high tension, beautifully edited together to show the three characters’ unpredictable situations. Running as a constant throughout is innocent Grace Kelly and the will-she-won’t-she predicament of her impending murder.

4. Sleuth (Mankiewicz, 1972)

Location: English country manor houseSet-up: Two adulterers spar off against each in a strategic game of cat and mouse based around a love of crime fiction and a mutual disliking of one anotherTimeframe: Three daysQuote: “Andrew, be sure and tell them, it was only a bloody game.”

Sleuth is based on Anthony Shaffer’s play of the same name. He was reluctant to see a screen version of his work and went to lengths to avoid selling the rights. When the pull of cinema finally overcame him, he vigorously recommended actors to play the two lead roles but director Joseph Mankiewicz had his own ideas. Indeed, it’s good he did. The film is less notable for the, admittedly excellent screenplay, than for the superb performances of Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine (who were both nominated for Academy Awards). The two actors are the only people ever seen on screen and carry the film with charisma and self-assurance.

3. Wait Until Dark (Young, 1967)

Location: ApartmentSet-up: Three crooks don various guises in order to find a heroin-stuffed doll in blind woman Susy Hendrix’s apartment.Timeframe: Two daysQuote: “Did you know they wanted to kill me? I did. I knew even before they did.”

After the pre-credit sequence and some early character establishment between the three crooks, Wait Until Dark settles into its one location set-up, taking place in a single day. It’s a fascinating suspense film made more interesting by the protagonist Susy’s blindness. Brought to the screen with poise and Hepburn’s inherent elegance, Susy is a woman coming to terms with her new life. She’s tough and in control, not allowing her sight to demean her. Any fragility she shows in the face of danger comes not from her blindness but for the love she feels for her husband, and the care and affection she has for friend Gloria. When the lights are extinguished in the film’s nerve-shredding climax and we as an audience are plunged into darkness, we inherit Susy’s condition. It’s a devastating and frightening experience – an experience any person with sight would panic in – and yet Susy is the aggressor (albeit an unwilling one).

2. Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954)

Location: ApartmentSet-up: Photographer L.B. Jefferies has suffered a broken leg and can’t leave his apartment. He starts spying on his neighbours and believes one of them has murdered his wife and hidden the body.Timeframe: A few daysQuote: “Because everything this fellow’s done has been suspicious: trips at night in the rain, knifes, saws, trunks with rope, and now this wife that isn’t there anymore.”

Rear Window breaks the mould in that it doesn’t feature an ensemble cast nor do the events it depicts start and finish in a day or two (a side effect of being based on a short story rather than a theatre play when it comes to Hitchcock single location movies). However, it’s no less a one location film, taking the idea and making better use of it than all but one of the films on this list. Alfred Hitchcock was a master with the camera. In Rear Window his camera only leaves the protagonist’s apartment for a brief few moments at the end of the movie. At all other times, the camera and therefore the audience is locked away with James Stewart’s Jefferies in the apartment, seeing the world as he sees it from his window.

And that’s the brilliance of Rear Window – arguably Hitchcock’s finest film – in that our world is localised and subjective. Hitchcock makes us complicit voyeurs. We see as Jefferies sees. We are given no prior knowledge and are privy to nothing outside of Jefferies’ experiences. This presents us with a unique sense of suspense – an authentic, personal sense of mystery. Although Jefferies believes he has witnessed wrongdoing we as an audience don’t have to believe him. We have the same evidence but can interpret it any way we please. The suspense comes from our inherent support for the protagonist; a hope that in the end he’s proven right. It also comes from our own desire to be proven right – did the neighbour commit murder and hide the body? We as an audience have probably come to our own conclusion, which may or may not coincide with Jefferies’ idea, and we await (with finger nails bitten) the justification or otherwise of our verdict.

1. 12 Angry Men (Lumet, 1957)

Location: Jury RoomSet-up: Twelve jurors retire to consider their verdictTimeframe: Two hoursQuote: “It’s always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And wherever you run into it, prejudice always obscures the truth.”

Sidney Lumet’s greatest film is a perfect example of the one location movie. Its ensemble cast of characters are rendered on screen with individuality and depth. The film also displays a faultless progression of plot and character, and with Lumet’s controlled and confident direction, it never loses its momentum or its grip on the audience. It is one of the greatest American movies ever made, and one that should be shown to any student of film who wants to learn the fundamentals of plot and character. Much of the film’s appeal comes from Henry Fonda. He is the single dissenter who stands up for what he believes in despite facing total opposition. It is the classic tale of courage and trusting your own judgement – an easily digested charm that resonates amongst audiences.

About the Author

Dan Stephens is the founder and editor of Top 10 Films. He's usually pondering his next list, often inspired by his adoration for 1980s Hollywood, a time-travelling DeLorean and an adventurous archaeologist going by the name Indiana.

Deathtrap is a brilliant addition Michael. I’ve been looking for a decent copy of the film on DVD for ages but to no avail. I think I saw the film on TV and haven’t seen it since. Hopefully someone will release it at some point in the UK.

I haven’t seen many of these. I’ll be adding them to my ever growing list of films that need to be seen.

Thanks for doing this one, Dan. I loved 12 Angry Men, Reservior Dogs, Rear Window and of course The Breakfast Club. TBC is a film that shows that you don’t need a lot of movie tricks to make a film work. A terrific script, tight direction and a cast that embodies the spirit of the script, and voila, you have a classic.

If I could add one, it would be the Ryan Reynolds film, Buried. In it, he wakes up in a box and buried somewhere out the middle of nowhere. He is left with a cell phone and matches. It’s a race against time to find him before his air runs out. It’s riveting and scary and benefits from Reynolds wit and humour.

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